Uncle Marcus is the 47-year-old failure
who runs the country estate of his vain, hypochondriacal professor
brother-in-law whilst nursing a hopeless devotion to “Sir Prof”’s
second wife; meanwhile, his teenage niece harbours an equally futile
crush on the local doctor, who is nothing special except in such a
socially starved milieu… Sound familiar? Perhaps if, for “Marcus”, we
substituted “Vanya”…? Exactly.

Chekhov
is relocated to Irish country houses far more often than to English
ones; it is hard to find a plausible analogue of rural isolation in
English terms. Alan Ayckbourn makes his choice of the Lake District
work well, though, with characters suggesting that even Keswick is a
bustling metropolis compared to the nowhere that is fictional
Ennerdale. Setting the play in the 1930s is another canny touch: just
as the National Theatre’s revival last year of Rattigan’s After The Dance
crystallised that moment, pre-World War Two, when the urban upper
middle classes began to glimpse their own pointlessness, so Ayckbourn
here creates a rural equivalent by transplanting Chekhov’s
pre-revolutionary Russians. Russian fatalism morphs into English
understatement, particularly in the case of the ineffectual neighbour
nicknamed “Waffles” or, here, more properly Julian Touchweston
(pronounced “Toughton”)-Smith. Terence Booth’s pomposity as “Sir Prof”
also finds an authentically English voice.

One
respect in which Ayckbourn’s normally sensitive ear lets him down here
is that of expletives. Vanya of course grows increasingly blunt through
Chekhov’s four acts, and Matthew Cottle’s Marcus is plain-spoken from
the first, but surely not even he, in 1935, would be quite as fond of
dismissing so much so often as “bollocks”. This is the only major false
note in Cottle’s portrayal of a man who, for all his grumbling, is
really trying not to look face-on at his wasted life. Likewise Phil
Cheadle’s Dr Ash (formerly Astrov), whose passion for amateur forestry
has seldom seemed less intellectually heroic, however Sonya may pant in
awe at it. Amy Loughton’s Sonya is constantly referred to as doing well
at school, and Loughton imbues her with a head-girlish briskness which
modulates nicely into oh-gosh infatuation and disintegrates
heartbreakingly in her final speech. Ayckbourn does not find specific
new insights in Uncle Vanya, but he does confirm the universality of the play and its characters.